Thought Leaders Series: 2017

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth. – (2 Timothy 2:15)

The popular way of reading the Bible is through one dimension. I don’t know why we do this, because we don’t read any other book that way. This, I believe is the biggest challenge facing the Church.

When we assume this position we take the text literally, and we read or study from our Worldview.

For example, the Fishermen from Galilee are seen as mere fishermen today. We fail to understand that like Jesus (whom many assume was self-taught), these men would have benefited from the reform by Ezra et al. As such they would have been in education from the age of 5 to at least 17, and at this point they would have studied a vocation in preparation for marriage.

A small amount would continue with further studies, thereby deferring marriage. In fact this was the only reason why a man could defer marriage. They would have studied Jewish history, commentaries, prophetic texts, wisdom texts, and poetry.

We also loose the sociopolitical forces at play at the time of the writing (the context), the opposing arguments, the prevailing worldview, and the author’s intent (the spirit of the writing).

In essence, these life transforming Texts becomes powerless when these dimensions are ignored. They become shallow and irrelevant in thoughts and deeds.